Who Will Win the Battle of the eBook Readers? Adobe or Microsoft? Maybe Palm or MobiPocket?
And do we care? Yes, both, and neither. Some people may compare the contest between Adobe's Acrobat Reader and Microsoft's Reader to be like Beta versus VHS but it is not the same, hence both can win. The reason is that both companies give away their reader, so as an end user, do you care if you need to keep two, free, readers installed on your workstation? Unlike the Beta and VHS war, companies did not give away free VCRs, so once you purchased a VCR, you were locked into buying only media that your VCR supported.
The VCR war was really won by content creators ("the movie people") choosing to distribute content in VHS format not Beta. In the electronic book reader contest, the number of content creators is much larger than the "movie" business and the cost of creating content in different formats is trivial, thus both electronic book readers will have access to tremendous amount of content. What will be important is how these readers are supported by hardware readers, like Rocket eBook and Softbook (now the REB devices) and others. This is why standards like OEB are very important as the ability to display an electronic book on a hardware reader is similar to playing a movie on a VCR. Today, we have a standard for video tapes, called VHS, in the future, we will have a standard called Open Electronic Books.
Of course, a caveat to this argument is that the content producers (publishers) may not want to produce books in multiple formats just as movie companies did not want to produce a Beta and VHS version. But with that said there are two reasons the above argument still holds up:
- Most publishers produce a PostScript file for print (this assumes printing is around a few more years, which is a good assumption) and if they have a PostScript file, they can create a PDF file.
- Publishers may be willing to produce a couple of formats: OEB and PDF with the reason that one format supports print and the other may be perceived as better suited for electronic display on many output devices.
What can be said with some surety is that publishers will not want to support multiple formats as creating files is not their reason for being in business and if there is not cooperation within the industry on the structure and packaging of electronic books, this latest cycle in the evolution of electronic books may be another proverbial, one step forward, two steps backward.
A postscript: when this article was originally written in early 2000, it seemed that a universal format would come about, and it did more or less. The OeBF format is widely used but only "underneath" the covers as an "intermediate" format before final conversion to one of the popular formats like Adobe, Microsoft, MobiPocket, or Palm and as well as other eBook readers which seem to pop up on a regular basis. On the one hand, the variety of readers enables consumers to read eBooks on many devices but on the other hand, it means that unless a title is available in all formats, the consumer may have to manage three or more readers to read their favorite eBook. For the foreseeable future, which in the Internet age is about 6 to 12 months, consumers will want access to all of the major eBook readers to make sure they can read their favorite content.